Back home I got to work on the stabilator. With the sawhorses and some additional stuff to prop it up enough and a bit of patience the stabilator came on pretty easy.
Some noise next to the driveway caught my attention.
A baby quail following the rest of the crowd and Mommy- I must have disturbed them. The eggs it passed were quail eggs that didn't hatch.
Back to work. Connecting the cables to the horns was actually easy despite the washers that had to get squeezed next to the horn and in between the forks.
Then I took somewhat more than half an hour to put the large cover in place that holds the bulkhead in place when the cables get tensioned. There are really a lot of screws going into this thing!
Now the second turnbuckle went on both sides of the cable ends easily. I tightened them by feel and checked both cables with the tensiometer. It's the blue scale that applies here and the reading is at the 6 o'clock position. Right on 40 lbs. I should mentions here that Van's got back to me about the groove problem. Reality is right and the plans are wrong. They said "they had not gotten around to correct the plans yet" and provided me with a link to VAF where the grooves were discussed before. So is VAF now the official Van's Tech Support forum?
However, taking a close look at the cables and their routes through the belly, I was not happy. Not happy at all! It seems that the further to the front the more the cables want to chafe, at the edges of the holes they are supposed to pass. The upper one is particularly bad and is indeed touch with quite some force and the very front hole. There's no way of adjust anything in that respect so I am a bit at a loss here.
Also, all the cable ends are outside of the turnbuckles more than the three threads Van's was asking for. If I would screw them in deeper, the tension could easily be double the requested amount.
The elevator feel on the stick is nice though. No feeling of sawing the bulkheads in half, no chafing noise or anything. I will ask Van's what they think about this but I sure won't get an answer before Monday. Also if someone here has a comment, please leave a message with your thoughts!
I will have to take the stabilator off again anyway as it is way too big to work around in the carport. The same is probably true for the rudder but only because the entrance is to low to allow the fuselage to get pushed back far enough to have enough room for the engine installation. And I do want to have the firewall inside the carport and not halfway outside in the sun.
A bit frustrated about the results, I resorted to stuff I can control. I riveted some nutplates on the tunnel cover that will hold the flap handle arrestor.
That at least turned out very nice.
Tomorrow I will take the stabilator off again and store it until it gets hauled to the hangar that I will rent starting next month. I believe I might build one of those temporary garages/sun-covers so I can get my truck out of the sun. If there's still time I will start the trim work on the canopy.
Thanks to a comment from Randy I now know that I am not alone with the cable problems. he also had touching cables in the holes and way too many threads showing outside of the turnbuckles. The latter seem to go away by trying multiple times and by tightening the turnbuckles evenly.
ReplyDeleteThe cure for the touching cables in the holes is to insert additional snap bushings which should have been provided by Van's anyway. It turned out that I had enough extra bushings from a previous order, so I could add them right away. I took the stab off for now, so I will re-tension everything when getting to the hangar in about a month or so.
Here's Van's reply:
ReplyDelete"Unfortunately the tolerances on the cables is such that this problem can come up from time to time. What I will do is send you a second set of the long cables for the stabilator, you will have to mix and match to find a combination that works so you get the cable tension with the appropriate amount of threads showing."
No word on the cables touching the edge of the holes... I am also not sure how to determine the right cables without the stabilator installed. I guess I'll just look which ones are longer.